VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

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text is accompanied by a visual dimension that opens the perspectives of
interpretation, the accommodation to the product being facilitated once we
familiarize ourselves with it on a sensory level.
Revisiting Lakoff's perspective, based on the fundamental idea that
metaphors are conceptual rather than purely linguistic phenomena, it has been
stated that they mustn't be and indeed are not limited to verbal expressions.
Metaphors can be expressed visually through images, either static, as in the case
of magazine adverts or billboards, or moving, as with commercials and movies.
These expression modes can be combined with all of the five senses (sight,
hearing, touch, smell, taste etc.) in order to render possible the construction and
interpretation of metaphors in a pictorial or even a multimodal manner.
Following Lakoff's explanation of the linguistic context created by the use
of metaphor in everyday language, we might argue that advertising slogans
function from a contemporary standpoint as trans-cultural metaphors. If, as we
have shown, the rhetorical structure of metaphors resides and functions in a
complex network of signs and socio-cultural meanings, advertising slogans
manage to convey concepts and ideas regardless of social and cultural
barriers, liberalizing the meanings through the use of metaphor as a guide. We
often use in our everyday language advertising slogans as metaphors to aid
us in getting through an idea to our communication partners; familiar to a large
audience, their integration in our interactions facilitates the understanding of
the communicated contents, so much so that if we wish to express courage,
we can easily achieve this by resorting to the Nike slogan - Just do it!.
Of image and other daemons
Noteworthy for this discussion is the strong link between the text and the
advertising image as a metaphor generator. The advertising discourse initially
presents itself as an unstable, hybrid structure in which the balancing of text and
images is made in an uncontrollable manner. Second most influential for the
consumers, though extremely visible in everyday language, the linguistic
signifier emerges within the advertising discourse as several textual constructs:
logo, slogan, body text, each serving the advertising discourse by simple way of
the fact that any advertising argumentation begins with its visibility.
From the typography layout within the page, designed to grab the
attention, to the aesthetic construction of the logo, intended to create/increase
brand memorability, the pragmatic characteristic of most of advertising texts is
its sustainability, with the attention directed towards the visual-figurative whole.
This indicates that even the construction of the advertising text abides by the
outline of the visual and the visual metaphor which generates new meanings:
specific typefaces for the logo and slogan, specific colors and textures for the
letters, different orientation of text within the page, all of these draw attention
on the importance of advertising visual rhetoric, as we will try to show.
"Weather we like it or not, each of us experiences at the present time a
crack within the representation of the world and so, its reality. The split